Linux 7.0 To Remove Support For AMD's Never-Released Ryzen AI NPU2
The upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel (unless it ends up being called Linux 6.20) will drop support for the AMD NPU2 as their second-generation neural processing unit that never ended up being released into any retail products.
Not to be confused with the second-generation "XDNA 2" NPU found with the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series SoCs, the AMD NPU2 hardware was never in any released product for Ryzen AI SOCs or otherwise. NPU2 was an early-stage NPU effort within AMD that never wound up in a commercial product. AMD's open-source AMDXDNA accelerator driver within the Linux kernel supports NPU1, NPU2, NPU4, NPU5, and NPU6. Yes, no NPU3 either in any released product albeit in that case never made it into the AMDXDNA upstream driver. But with NPU2 not in any released products, the AMDXDNA driver is dropping the NPU2 code to avoid the ongoing maintenance costs to the open-source driver.
AMD engineer Lizhi Hou last week posted the patch to remove the NPU2 hardware support since it was "never publicly released and is now obsolete. Remove all remaining NPU2 support from the driver."
That NPU2 removal was then queued up and submitted for DRM-Next via Friday's drm-misc-next pull. Thus tracking for the Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel. The AMDXDNA driver patches also add hardware context priority support as a new improvement in that pull. The Rockchip DRM driver also added RK3368 SoC HDMI support.
Not to be confused with the second-generation "XDNA 2" NPU found with the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series SoCs, the AMD NPU2 hardware was never in any released product for Ryzen AI SOCs or otherwise. NPU2 was an early-stage NPU effort within AMD that never wound up in a commercial product. AMD's open-source AMDXDNA accelerator driver within the Linux kernel supports NPU1, NPU2, NPU4, NPU5, and NPU6. Yes, no NPU3 either in any released product albeit in that case never made it into the AMDXDNA upstream driver. But with NPU2 not in any released products, the AMDXDNA driver is dropping the NPU2 code to avoid the ongoing maintenance costs to the open-source driver.
AMD engineer Lizhi Hou last week posted the patch to remove the NPU2 hardware support since it was "never publicly released and is now obsolete. Remove all remaining NPU2 support from the driver."
That NPU2 removal was then queued up and submitted for DRM-Next via Friday's drm-misc-next pull. Thus tracking for the Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel. The AMDXDNA driver patches also add hardware context priority support as a new improvement in that pull. The Rockchip DRM driver also added RK3368 SoC HDMI support.